President of the European Council Donald Tusk | Leon Neal/Getty Images

European Council President Donald Tusk will ask EU leaders next week to decide if the bloc’s controversial mandatory quota system for refugees is “ineffective” while pushing them to put money aside for migration in the next EU budget.

In a draft of the letter sent to member countries ahead of the European Council, and obtained by POLITICO, Tusk wrote that “the issue of mandatory quotas has proven to be highly divisive and the approach has turned out to be ineffective.”

He added that “only member states are able to tackle the migration crisis effectively” while the EU’s role is “to offer its full support in all possible ways to help member states” handle a migration crisis.

To achieve that, he called for a “stable and long-term financing mechanism, in place of the existing ad hoc pledging, on a much larger scale,” saying this should be one of the “key priorities” of the next EU multi-year budget.

EU leaders will discuss migration over dinner next Thursday. They are expected to reach agreement on revamped EU asylum rules by June.

In the letter, Tusk said he will ask leaders whether they “agree with the overall diagnosis.”

Tusk’s stance is a rebuke of the European Commission, which at the peak of the migration crisis in summer 2015 introduced a mandatory relocation scheme for 160,000 refugees, which was voted through by the Council. That target wasn’t even close to being met, with just 30,000 refugees relocated and some countries, including Hungary and Poland, refusing to take part.

In a ruling in July, the European Court of Justice said the Council had the right to impose mandatory quotas and to take executive action in virtually any emergency situation. But Tusk’s note effectively asks EU leaders to declare the policy a failure.